hello #?,

sometimes I think i could become crazy and ki*** arghl$&%§/ something... :)

I've downloaded the new mencoder with dvdsupport from morph.zone and wanted to convert a specific title from a dvd with best quality (file size does not matter), mp3 audio codec, 4:3 aspect size and with a cropped part (i don't need the blackborders around). Sadly the port comes without nothing (no good readme, config files and other things which are maybe needed). I also tried it with the codecs.conf from old mos mencoder, but that didn't worked too.

Quote:

after adding an empty codec.conf:

Quote:


Please, any quick help is _highly_ appreciated!

Thx!

regards,
tokai

For best Quality set video encoding to 3 pass (takes a lot of time though), and vqscale to 1. The way i understood it, vqscale is for a variable bitrate stream, the value is a divider for the original bitrate.

So if the dvd has a bitrate of 4000kbit/s, setting a vqscale of 2 would result in an average bitrate of 2000kbit/s for the divx.

As for the 3 pass encoding, in the first pass only audio gets encoded, to know the size of the resulting audio track.
In the second pass the movie gets encoded and a log file is made, this is used in the third pass so that mencoder can look where more bitrate for a frame would be useful, and where it doesn't need to give any (black frames i.e.). After the third encoding it gets mangled with the audio again, and the divx is done.

I wouldn't set the vqscale to 1 though, mpeg4 is more efficient then mpeg2, so a value of 2-4 should give reasonable good results.

All of the above is just what i think to have figured out, might all be rubbish :-Þ

Anyway, for more help, just ask.

Problem solved. It was just a stupid mencoder-alias in the shell-startup which has overwritten the current command, so i always executed the old binary in another path. *DOH*

anyway, thanks to CISC for hitting my head against the wall which has finaly unclouded my mind about this problem... just a few hours more and I had required a visit in the mental hospital.

example for good 3-pass encoding (DVD -> MPEG-4 (divx))

(if you don't know what's 3-pass or 2-pass encoding then read the encoding.html which comes in the mencoder archive)


1st pass:
mencoder -dvd 1 -dvd-device ide.device:2 -ovc frameno -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=3:br=128 -o frameno.avi

2nd pass:
mencoder -dvd 1 -dvd-device ide.device:2 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1:vqscale=4:mbd=2 -o finalmovie.avi

3rd pass:
mencoder -dvd 1 -dvd-device ide.device:2 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2:vqscale=4:mbd=2 -o finalmovie.avi


Change the quality if the video by changing the vqscale argument (2 has better quality, but also creates bigger file; 4 is probably the optimal value for the most cases)

Dunno if the command line is perfect (it created here a test.avi instead of a finalmovie.avi. But the result was very okay, IMHO.

hope this info will be useful for someone out there.